you can't really have one without the other, but in my experience, particularly at Amplify in the past 18 months, I've found that ACQUISITION is the most commonly underestimated for new startups. The other stuff really doesn't even come into play without it. I've seen thousands of young startups at Amplify and most of them don't really have a handle on how they will find and acquire new users.

Even for those companies we invested in (28 at the time of this answer) most of them don't have it cracked by any means. Sometimes the best we can hope for is a set of data supported "ideas" around customer acquisition, but ultimately it's a lot of testing.

One things I've also observed is that customer acquisition strategies don't always scale. By that I mean, you may be able to get users from a particular channel or activity at one price, but that caps out at 20 per day or 100 per month (at that price or in total). I encourage founders to try and understand how many users they'll actually need to get to the next big milestone (raising more cash, making revenue, running off cash-flow, etc.

Once they have a sense of where they need to be, that can drive the use of time associated with various customer acquisition strategies. In the end, getting customers, particularly on mobile, is hard effing shit. When I see a startup with a very unique approach to this, they stand out like a sore thumb (that's a good thing).